eBay’s Newest Is First Datacenter Run Entirely on Gas Fuel Cells

The National Security Administration’s brand-new, not-so-secret exascale facility in Bluffdale gets all the attention people in Utah can spare for datacenters, but eBay’s new site in South Jordan, Utah is breaking new ground, as well.

The setup, built by NASA spinoff Bloom Energy, generates about 8 megawatts of power for the site.

The Bloom Energy Servers sit in a facility about 100 feet from the datacenter’s servers, taking in natural gas from Utah utility pipelines, mixing it with oxygen, and processing it using a proprietary process to produce electricity. Specifications for the equipment predict it will fail only one tenth as often as electricity from the grid.

eBay designed the facility to be as space- and energy-efficient as possible, working with Dell on a modular datacenter design dubbed EPIC, each piece of which contains 24 rack positions pulling a megawatt of power. eBay and Dell claim the setup yields the densest modular datacenter design in the world.

The site is also the world’s largest modular datacenter, according to eBay and Hewlett-Packard, which handled the integration and supplied its own equipment for an HP EcoPOD equipment room with 44 rack positions and 1.4 megawatts of power.

A second power system, under construction by eco-friendly energy company Ormat, will collect waste heat generated by the fuel-cell setup to generate another 5 megawatts. That system is scheduled to come online in about 18 months.

Google also uses Bloom Energy fuel cells in its network of datacenters, but the eBay facility is reportedly the first to run entirely from fuel cells and use power from the public grid only for backup.

The new facility also cost less than the previous energy-conserving datacenter next to it, according to eBay datacenter chief Dean Nelson.

The Bloom Energy Servers – at several hundred thousand dollars apiece – are more expensive than many other energy sources, but allow the facility to eliminate most of the uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), generators and other power-management equipment.

Maintenance on the fuel cells is also expensive, however, which has so far helped keep fuel cells from topping the equipment list of datacenter managers looking for the most cost-efficient power-efficient hardware available, according to datacenter-construction and management consultant Scott Noteboom of LitBit, as quoted in Wired.